Western Digital results for its fourth fiscal 2009 quarter are signalling the possible end of the recession in the hard disk drive market, and it is poised to overtake Seagate in unit drive shipments.
World number 2 hard disk drive manufacturer WD saw fourth quarter revenues of $1.928bn, down 3 per cent from the previous year's …

COMMENTS

Recent Seagate Experiences

Okay, so last year I bought a Seagate hard drive, it died within a year. So I sent it in to claim the warranty. I received a refurbished Seagate hard drive back. It died within 2 months. Someone I know bought a HP computer which had a Seagate hard drive in it, it died within 6 months. So many Seagate hard drives are failing that after it died I saw an advisory about it on HP's website.

If you ask me, Seagate is going to lose its #1 crown because it forgot how to make a hard drive.

WD seem to be the only good brand left

I've been let down in the past by IBM (4 bad 30GB drives), Maxtor (4 bad 80GB drives), Seagate (1 bad 60GB and 2 bad 100GB drives, I never bothered trying the reconditioned replacements from previous experience with IBM and Maxtor), and Samsung (6 bad 750GB drives, not even bothered claiming under warranty due to previous poor recons). I'm currently a WD bloke and so far, touch wood, they seem to be the most reliable brand available. Their Green Raid Edition drives are proving to be rather good.

Re: WD seem to be the only good brand left

I've been let down by every HD manufacturer you've mentioned and mostly by WD. I've only stuck with Seagate so long because they've had the lowest failure rate of all the drives I've personally used. (touch wood, my 1TB Seagate drive that was supposed to die hasn't yet.)

But I'm not going to jump ship to WD. I have no proof to support this but I believe that HD reliability is a cycle that most manufacturers go through. Karma, bad design, crap factories, etc ... all catch up at one point or another.

The reason the recession is going to end for all HD manufacturers is because no consumer is going to trust any one manufacturer again and will simply buy two drives (from competing manufacturers hopefully) to be prepared for the inevitable.

WD is No. 1

I've never liked Seagate, due to high failure rates, and even more so since they took over Maxtor. I've NEVER had a Western Digital hard drive fail, compared to about 25 Seagate/Maxtor ones, and that's NOT including customer ones. The Maxtor 2F0L0 20GB drives were known to be crap, I had bucketloads of them die, either electronically, or because of bearing failure. They only had 2 platters, were thin and quiet, but failure prone.

As far as I'm concerned, from my experience (I'm a repair company owner), Western Digital and Hitachi are my top two, and the only ones that go in any of my machines or company servers. When I stick a WD in a computer, I am assured that it isn't going to come back for HD replacement, only maintenance and regular backup, as my customers entrust me to do backups for them on site.

If WD start to sell SSD's mainstream, and eventually as cheaply as their mechanical drives, I won't hesitate to use them. Their recent pricing of their new 1TB 2.5" drive at around $179 has surprised me, too.